One per cent

Stuck in a boring meeting? Then you need AgencyGlass&colon; goggles that make you look wide-eyed with wonder, even if you are fast asleep. Developed by Hirotaka Osawa at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, the goggles display animated eyes and come with motion sensors. When you nod your head, for instance, the eyes blink. If your head drops forward, the eyes will move to maintain gaze direction with your partner. Spookily, the eyes also follow the motion of the person you are talking to. Watch them in action at bit.ly/fakeeye.

“When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government”Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg writes a blog post in which he says he contacted US president Barack Obama to complain about the National Security Agency’s invasion of Facebook’s IT systems

Advertisement

Hidden secrets in your phone calls

Information on the people you call can give away more than you think. Jonathan Mayer at Stanford University, California, asked 546 volunteers to download the MetaPhone app, which logged who people called, but not what was said – similar to the metadata the US National Security Agency has been collecting. From this he could work out a lot about people’s lives, he wrote on his blog. For example, it suggested that one person got an abortion, as she placed multiple calls to a Planned Parenthood Centre after a long call with her sister.

Fishbot gets a wriggle on

A flexible robotic fish can quickly change direction just by wiggling its tail, closely mimicking the behaviour of real fish. Developed by Andrew Marchese from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the soft-bodied robot’s brain is protected by a rigid head while its belly is filled with carbon dioxide. Releasing the gas into different parts of the pliable tail inflates actuators, allowing the fish to undulate.